“I’m describing all these scenes without sparing myself, in order to recall it all clearly and restor the impression”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky in “The Adolescent”

Hello everyone, and welcome! My name is Stephen Dalil. I am a freshman at the College of William & Mary with an infatuation with literature in translation, and American literature! I enjoy reading Fyodor Dostoevsky and Kurt Vonnegut books. Funny enough, these two authors are the same zodiac sign as I am (Scorpio). These two authors also share the same birthday, November 11th, although they were born about 100 years apart. I digress. To commemorate the birth of my blog, I’ll start with a TBR in March. During this month of Ramadan, St. Patrick’s Day, my mom’s birthday, and my spring break, I’ll try to finish up The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky. As a college student, free time is a bit hard to come by. This problem is best exemplified by the fact that I started reading The Adolescent in January, and have yet to finish it. I also plan on reading The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, and Breaking Stalin’s Nose by Eugene Yelchin. With spring break near, I hope to read 3 of these books over the break! Now, I am going to go over the reasons as to why I chose to read these books.

The Adolescent

First, I’ll go over the reasons why I’m reading The Adolescent. As I mentioned earlier, I enjoy Fyodor Dostoevsky, so I decided to finish his “Big 5” novels this year. His big 5 are Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), The Adolescent (1875), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). They are called the Big 5 because these five novels are the most studied worldwide and are also Titanic-sized. Sometimes, Notes from Underground (1864) replaces The Adolescent, but I recognize Notes as a sort of prequel to his Big 5. I think the ideas contained in Notes are the seeds for each of his Big 5 novels. Getting back on track, I decided to finish Dostoevsky’s Big 5 Novels this year because I am planning on doing a research project on Dostoevsky over the summer. I’ll leave that explanation for another blog post.

The Lost Steps

Onto the next object on my March reading list: The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier. I discovered this book from the Penguin Classics Instagram Page. They posted about a new translation of the novel, and I HAD to get it. Before this Instagram post, I had never heard about Alejo Carpentier. He was a Cuban writer who influenced Latin American writing heavily. He inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez who wrote 100 Years of Solitude and A Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s prose, so I simply had to check out a writer that inspired him. Carpentier inspired him so much that upon reading Explosion in a Cathedral, Gabriel Garcia Marquez threw away the first draft of 100 Years of Solitude. I hope to see what Garcia Marquez saw in Carpentier.

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy has been on my TBR for a while now. I have been introduced to him fleetingly through social media. In December of last year, a friend told me about how he was writing a paper on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. This subtle recommendation by my friend drove me to purchase a copy of Blood Meridian.

Flights

Flights has been in my physical TBR since August. August is Women In Translation month, so I decided to pick up a book by a Nobel Prize Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk. I do not know much about the book itself nor do I know much about Olga Tokarczuk, so this book is a blind read. I think blind reads are intimidating, but the experience of a blind read is unmatched.

Breaking Stalin’s Nose

I am reading this novel for a course that I am enrolled in this semester. The course is called “Reading @Russia” and it explores the media history of Russia. In this class, we’ve already read folktales, and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. We inspired George Orwell’s 1984, and is a satire of the exceedingly organized and inorganic nature of totalitarian society in the 20th century. I enjoyed reading We and it stands toe to toe with 1984. Writing this post is reminding me that I need to read both books again! I digress. Breaking Stalin’s Nose is not a completely blind read because my professor shared some details about it already. I think the most interesting detail is that it is a quasi-picture book. I am excited to read this during the break. I am also a little anxious since we will be discussing the novel in class right after the break ends.

That concludes the brief rationale for reading each book. I will try and update my progress on each of these reads soon. Thank for reading my inaugural blog post!